This post was published long before the Mists of Pandara Expansion.
The tips and techniques explained here may be outdated.

Kinetic Bombs Suck

Ok so we’re working on the Blood Princes. The fight itself seems pretty easy. Avoid the bad stuff and hit whoever has a health bar until they all die. The thing is.. there’s ALOT of other stuff going on all at the same time to avoid. Some forces you to move away.. some stuff you to move towards.. you do the hokey-pokey.. just a lot of sensory overload.

My job Sunday night was to pop the beachballs up into the air.
See there are these things.. Kinetic Bombs. They spawn when one of the bosses says: My cup runith over. They each last for 60 seconds. Hitting them pops them up in the air. There can be 2-3 up at the same time throughout the fight. The harder you hit them the further up they pop. If they hit the ground they explode, do a significant amount of raid-wide damage.. and they knock everyone back 50 yards (v. annoying when you might get knocked into more bad stuff or out of heal range).

But it’s got a couple of hidden gotchas that no one bothered to mention. Here’s what I’ve found through grepping the Internet.

1. My Fel puppy can keep a single bomb up for its full duration.*** Set your puppy to passive (he really already should be in a raid anyways). Set him to attack one of the beachballs. He’ll run back to your side when his bomb despawns. I like to set him on my current beachball so I can be free to run to the next beachball.

2. Kinetic bombs sometimes randomly explode in the air. Current theory is that if there are any dots on the bomb when it despawns it causes the bomb to explode damaging the raid and knocking everyone back.

3. Kinetic bombs seem to only be vulnerable to direct damage. So if you’re a warlock.. who’s trying desperately to pop a bomb up in the air.. and you spam your instant cast dots on it as you run towards it.. it doesn’t do bubkus.. and the fucking bomb still explodes. So direct damage only. I’ve found Death Coil to be a fantastic clutch spell.. once every two minutes (sigh). Other than that.. Searing Pain, Shadow Bolt, or (shudder) wand.

Bomb #3 that spawns on the farside of the room from me.. when my pets is on Bomb #1.. and I’m on bomb#2.. make me want to cry and kick kittens.

***Some forums report that the felhunters were popping the kinetic bombs so far up in the air that they were aggroing Queen Lan’athal upstairs. Since I’ve never run into this problem I’m going to guess that they hotfixed it.

You need hunters! Each hunter can keep one orb bouncing on the pet’s nose while doing 90% DPS to their main target. If you are using a hunter to tank Kel, he can set up a mouseover macro for this. Also, a single hunter can do almost as much DPS if they have to randomly take breaks from their boss DPS to run around the room and manually shoot the rest of the orbs up.
.-= Euripides´s last blog ..Pets Now Eligible for ICC Buff! =-.

Unfortunately, we only have 1 hunter (and only 10 people in the raid), and he can’t always make it to raids. We’ve also found that if someone is given balls AND boss DPS … balls hit the ground.
.-= Stop´s last blog ..Caffeine is recruiting! =-.

* Use your imp – it can sit at the other side of the room and keep orbs very high
* Keep orbs as high as possible as you may need to move quickly at some point to get a newly spawned orb or get out of range of an ability.
* Don’t rely on the orb person being the first to hit it when it spawns, other people can hear the emote hit the orb once then allow the orb people to take over after that
* In 25 man try situate 1 person in each corner, they can dps any prince in their range but shouldn’t move too far
* Remember it’s not a dps race – even on hard mode the enrage timer is extremely high.